This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...

We propose a novel empirical framework to assess the likelihood of joint and conditional failure for Euro area sovereigns. Our model is based on a dynamic skewed-t copula which captures all the salient features of the data, including skewed and heavy-tailed changes in the price of CDS protection...

When debt levels approach critical levels, tax payers may revolt against the associated debtservice burden. Funding problems may arise in capital markets when lenders anticipate such revolts and refuse to participate in debt auctions. We provide a stochastic framework to assess whether such...

We consider models where the Ramsey-optimal fiscal policy under Full Commitment (FC) is time-inconsistent and define a new notion of optimal policy, Limited-Time Commitment (LTC). Successive one-period lived governments can commit to future plans over a finite horizon. We provide a sufficient...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

This paper investigates the contribution of private and public channels for consumption risk sharing in the EMU over the period 1999-2015. In particular, we explore the role of financial integration versus international financial assistance for private consumption smoothing in this set of...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of government debt and the associated risk of inflation within a monetary union when countries have different pension systems. I use a stochastic two-country two-period overlapping-generations model, where one country has PAYG pensions and the...

In this paper we investigate experimentally the functioning of a wage tax financed unemployment benefit system on the development of the budget deficit, unemployment, and some other indicators of economic performance in an international economy. We find support for the hypothesis that...

Uncertainty about the future preferences of the government may induce policy makers to run excessive budget deficits. As a solution to this problem, economists have proposed to impose a binding debt rule. In this paper we argue that a binding debt rule does not eliminate the distortions due to...